GalaxyCon's Independent Conquest: The Acquisition of Incredible Conventions and the Rise of the "Anti-Live Nation" Fan Circuit

How a Fort Lauderdale convention company became the largest independent fan event operator in North America through a disciplined regional rollup - and what it signals for the future of the convention market.

By Carry and Conquer Publications

GalaxyCon is now the largest geek culture convention organization in North America, and it did not get there by accident.

When Fort Lauderdale-based GalaxyCon announced on June 24, 2025 that it had acquired three shows from Virginia-based Incredible Conventions LLC - Superstar Comic Con in Savannah, Georgia; Nashville Comicon in Nashville, Tennessee; and Incredible Con in Charleston, South Carolina - it was the latest move in a years-long rollup that has quietly reshaped the independent fan convention market. With those three properties folded in, GalaxyCon's 2026 calendar stands at over 21 events, a figure that would have seemed implausible just three years ago. In 2023, the company ran seven live shows. The velocity of that growth - seven to eleven to twenty-one in the span of three years - is unmatched in the industry.

From Garage Sales to the Largest Independent Convention Company in North America

The story of GalaxyCon is, at its core, a story about two convention founders who sold their flagship properties and came out stronger for it - and one of them doing it twice over.

Mike Broder launched the first Florida Supercon in November 2006 at a Ramada hotel in Hollywood, Florida. He was chasing something simple: a large-scale fan convention for South Florida. The first show drew around 2,000 people. From there, Broder expanded up and down the Florida coast, adding shows in the Fort Lauderdale and Miami metro areas through the late 2000s. By 2017 he had crossed the state line into Raleigh, North Carolina, picking up the crowd that had attended Wizard World's now-defunct Raleigh show.

Then in March 2019, Broder sold Florida Supercon and the "Supercon" trademark to ReedPop - the Norwalk, Connecticut-based convention giant that also owns New York Comic Con, Emerald City Comic Con, and C2E2. ReedPop paid an undisclosed sum to plant its flag in South Florida. Broder retained his non-Florida events and rebranded them under the name GalaxyCon, launching GalaxyCon Raleigh in July 2019 as the inaugural event under the new identity. He added GalaxyCon Richmond and GalaxyCon Minneapolis in short order.

It was a shrewd piece of capital allocation. By cashing in the flagship and keeping the regional portfolio, Broder acquired the financial runway to grow precisely when his corporate competitors were standing still. During the pandemic, as ReedPop, Informa's Fan Expo, and Comic-Con International went dark, Broder pivoted GalaxyCon to virtual events - Zoom panels, virtual celebrity experiences, signed collectibles shipped to fans at home. He went from 15 full-time employees to 40 during the shutdown. When every other show was shrinking, GalaxyCon was building infrastructure.

The payoff came when live events reopened. GalaxyCon Richmond drew 18,500 people in February 2020. By 2023, the same show brought in over 30,000. That trajectory gave Broder - and newly hired Senior VP Peter Katz, who joined from Wizard World and Fan Expo's Informa chain - the confidence to accelerate the geographic expansion they had spent the pandemic months planning.

The Incredible Conventions Deal: Strategic Geography, Personal Timing

The acquisition of three Incredible Conventions shows was clean in its logic. GalaxyCon was already present in Savannah through Nightmare Weekend - the horror-themed sub-brand it had launched as a variant alongside Animate!, its anime-focused series. Adding Superstar Comic Con Savannah gave it a second event in a market it already understood. Nashville and Charleston, meanwhile, were blank spots on GalaxyCon's map. Nashville Comicon and Incredible Con Charleston were established regional events with existing audiences that GalaxyCon could develop under its brand and infrastructure, bypassing the time and risk of cold-start launches.

The deal was negotiated directly between Katz and Incredible Conventions President Mike Federali. Federali's own convention origin story has a distinctly grass-roots quality. He launched the first Tidewater Comicon in Virginia Beach in 2014 after selling his personal comic book collection - at garage sales, flea markets, and on AMC's Comic Book Men - to raise the rental fee for a hotel event space. He expected 200 people. More than 3,500 showed up. From that overcrowded hotel room, Federali built a convention company spanning more than a dozen events, predominantly across Virginia and the mid-Atlantic, including Tidewater Comicon, Hampton Comicon, Anime Virginia Beach, Shenandoah Comic Con, Virginia Beach Comic Con, and several anime-focused regional shows.

The three shows sold to GalaxyCon were the outliers in that portfolio - the ones that had pushed south and west beyond Federali's Virginia base. His stated reasons for selling carry the ring of authenticity: he wanted to focus on his remaining shows, spend more time with a new daughter and son, and hand the three growth-market properties to an operator with the resources to scale them properly. He will serve as a consultant to GalaxyCon on the transition, and Incredible Conventions continues to run its extensive Virginia and mid-Atlantic calendar independently.

The Rollup Model and What It Signals for the Market

The Incredible Conventions deal is not an isolated transaction. It is one data point in a deliberate acquisition and expansion strategy that GalaxyCon has pursued methodically since 2022. The company ran seven live events in 2023, expanded to eleven in 2024, and lined up twenty-one for 2025 before the Incredible Conventions deal was even announced. By mid-2024, it had already announced new events in Philadelphia, Orlando, Chicago, Cleveland, Miami, and St. Louis. The Incredible Conventions acquisition added Nashville and Charleston to that list and deepened coverage in Savannah.

The economic data underpinning this expansion is significant. GalaxyCon's 2024 events generated $42 million in local economic impact across the markets where it operates. The company projected that figure to roughly double in 2025, as the full slate of new shows comes online. For cities that have historically been underserved by the larger convention players - the San Diego Comic-Cons and New York Comic-Cons that anchor their calendars around the biggest metropolitan markets - a GalaxyCon arrival represents meaningful hospitality and retail spending that didn't previously exist.

This is the core of the value proposition that distinguishes GalaxyCon from the corporate convention industry. ReedPop and Informa's Fan Expo operate large-format shows in high-density markets, drawing six-figure attendance numbers in Seattle, Chicago, New York, and Toronto. Comic-Con International in San Diego remains the industry's singular prestige event. GalaxyCon positions itself differently: fan conventions for cities that don't otherwise get them, run by people who came up as fans themselves, with a deliberate emphasis on making shows financially accessible. General admission tickets for newly acquired shows have been priced at around $35.

Peter Katz, GalaxyCon's Senior VP of Business Development, previously ran Wizard World's convention chain before its collapse and then worked for Informa's Fan Expo circuit. He brings institutional knowledge of how the corporate model operates - and presumably a clear view of where it falls short. His stated objective at GalaxyCon, reflected in the pace of expansion since he joined, is to reach markets that the major players consider marginal.

The AI Art Ban and the Brand Identity Play

In September 2025, GalaxyCon made a strategic move that carried as much marketing value as operational substance: it announced a sweeping, zero-tolerance ban on AI-generated art across every event in its portfolio - GalaxyCon, Animate!, Nightmare Weekend, and Superstar Comic Con. The announcement came days after Dragon Con in Atlanta drew headlines for evicting a vendor who had been selling AI-generated merchandise.

Broder framed the ban in explicitly ethical terms, stating that the way AI is currently trained presents moral issues that can no longer be ignored in the industry. But the timing and execution also served a sharper commercial purpose. GalaxyCon is a company that has positioned itself as the fan-first alternative to corporate convention management. An AI art ban, enforced in the artist alley and vendor floor of every show it runs, sends a legible signal to the human artists and illustrators who make up a critical constituency of convention culture. Artists choose which shows to attend; their presence determines the quality of the exhibitor floor; and their willingness to recommend a show to other artists and fans generates the word-of-mouth that drives attendance in the regional markets where GalaxyCon competes.

The ban is brand differentiation in the language of values.

What Comes Next

With Nashville and Charleston coming online under the GalaxyCon flag in 2026 and a 21-event calendar now confirmed, the question is how far the company's rollup ambitions extend. Peter Katz signaled as much after the Incredible Conventions deal: "there may be more to come."

The convention market continues to fragment. Wizard World's circuit collapsed. Several mid-sized regional shows shut down permanently during the pandemic and never returned. The operators left standing fall roughly into two camps: the corporate consolidators - ReedPop, Informa, the remnants of the Wizard model - and the local independents, many of them founder-operated and capital-constrained. GalaxyCon occupies a third position: independent in ownership, professional in infrastructure, and aggressive in expansion. Mike Broder built the original Supercon into the most attended fan event in South Florida, sold it to a corporate buyer, and then built something larger. GalaxyCon now runs more events than any other independently owned convention company in North America. The Incredible Conventions deal suggests the appetite for further consolidation has not diminished.

For fans in Nashville, Charleston, and Savannah, the practical effect will be felt by early 2026: new guests, more programming, a larger exhibitor floor, and the operational polish of a company that has run the same playbook in a dozen cities before. For the convention industry more broadly, GalaxyCon's trajectory raises a question that the major players will eventually be forced to answer - whether the independent model, executed with enough capital discipline and regional focus, can scale into something that challenges the corporate incumbents at their own game.